Carrie Springer

Carrie Springer is senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she curated Photography and the Self: The Legacy of F. Holland Day, and coorganized
Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940-2001. Other exhibitions she has worked on there include The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, The Art of Richard Tuttle, and Kiki Smith: A Gathering. She has organized
numerous other exhibitions including Debbie Fleming Caffery's 1994 show, Mexico, at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.

RADIUS BOOKS

Published by Radius Books.Text by Carrie Springer. Foreword and poem by Luis Alberto Urrea.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Louisiana-born photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery lived and worked on the grounds of the Catholic church in a small village in northeastern Mexico using a tortilla shack as her studio. In addition to the religious life of the town, she turned her lens on the nearby cantina that occasionally served as a brothel. The Spirit and the Flesh explores the themes of grace, redemption, sin and forgiveness that Caffery encountered in this community--of which she has said, "I felt incredibly comfortable in a culture rich in celebrations of religious feasts, with strong, independent, highly emotional people, much like the people I grew up with in southwest Louisiana. The brothel brought new elements into my work: secrets, sensual needs, desire and, often, unexpected love." Debbie Fleming Caffery has been making photographs of the people and culture of her native Louisiana for more than 30 years; this is her fourth book.